Accents

[Deeba1234]

Re: Accents

@Huma

I hear accent reduction/neutralization training is quite big in India. Not sure if it has taken off in Pakistan too. Not a fan. It’s all a bit superficial in my opinion. It’s like skin lightening - some say brown skin isn’t as appealing as gori chitti skin and you should appear lighter to look beautiful. In the same way, desi accent isn’t the most alluring I know but it is what it is. People shouldn’t be expected to lose their accents. It shouldn’t be a deal breaker unless you couldn’t even comprehend each other or if there were fluency issues. I work with Europeans, Asians and South Indians with really strong accents of their own, sometimes during conferences I even have difficulty understanding them, but this is something that you just get so used to when you live in a diverse society, it’s not a big deal.

Would you say it was superficial if the situation was reversed and UK or US-born kids thought it no big deal to speak their parents’ languages in blatantly western accents? People often have a problem with those who neutralise their accents when they move to the west but when it comes to the opposite situation it’s obviously usually preferred to neutralise their accents to sound more desi..